 Hello and welcome to NewsClick. I am Paranjoy Guha Thakurtha and with me here in the studio, I have Pratik Sinha, founder, editor of old news. He's 36 years old. He founded and heads this fact-checking portal based in Ahmedabad. He has a background as a software engineer. He studied electronics engineering in Bangalore, worked in the United States and Vietnam and of course in India. In the first part of our conversation, we looked at how after Pulwama, there had been a proliferation of fake, false, disinformation, misinformation. That was being used to step up the chingoism hyper-nationalism. We looked at how the Bharti Janta Party and its troll army and its WhatsApp battalion, what they are likely to do as the elections began. In this, the second part of our conversation, first we take a step back. What are the different kinds of misinformation and disinformation? Normally, we believe that you can be genuinely misinformed. I can say that, you know, I thought you were 32 years old but you are actually 36 years old. I am misinformed. But I can also say that having known that you are 36 years old, I can try and spread disinformation that is you are 32 years old. It's a very, very trivial example. I'd like you to distinguish between the different kinds of fake and false information. So, see misinformation has various objectives. So, we have to look at this in two ways. Number one, we have to establish that it is organized. And while, you know, so all news, I think, sets itself apart from some of the other fact-checking websites because what we have often done is like we have gone down, so let's say there's a website which is putting out misinformation or slash disinformation, we have gone down and found who's actually running the website and found whether they have any links with any party or not. That means you physically visit? Not physically visit. This is all internet foreign things. So, you know, figure out- You go to the URL, the universal resource locator. I'll give you an example of one of our latest stories. There's a Facebook page called the India Eye. And now this Facebook page also is there on Namo app. So, Namo app has a section called My Network which is like a social media network and in which certain accounts are followed automatically which includes Mr. Modi's account himself, Ramishankar Prasad, all these ministers and one of the accounts is the India Eye. Now, we did a two-part story. The first part where we showed how the India Eye puts misinformation on a regular basis on a literally on a daily basis and what we showed was that the India Eye website, if you look at the IP address for example, it belongs to a company called Silver Touch Technologies in Ahmedabad. If you look at who bought that website, it is a person called Himanshu Jain who is a full-time director of Silver Touch Technologies in Ahmedabad. And what is Silver Touch Technologies? Silver Touch Technologies is the company which made the Naim the Modi app, which made the Rashtrapati Bhavan app and it has got plethora of government projects into the tune of crores. Now, when we spoke to the CEO of this company, when we were doing the story, he said we have got nothing to do with the India Eye, but all the links were pointed to the contrary. So, we have done multiple of these stories to show that when misinformation is put out, it is put out in an organized manner. Also, if you look at the way misinformation progresses, that is it is always linked to current affairs. So, for example, the day when... Today's latest news. So, one of the first videos after the IAF strike happened was this video of a missile homing in on an establishment and blowing it apart claiming that this is the IAF strike, but it was a video game. It was a video game. So, a game is being sort of being part of this. But who are the people who are doing this? Now, the fact that it is always mirroring the current affairs means that there is a propaganda that is going on to create a narrative. So, in this case, there's multiple kinds of misinformation. Number one, the one that mirrors the current affairs where on an everyday basis, for example, if something is said about deminitization, then there will be misinformation or deminitization. The second kind is political parties achieve X and they want to show X plus Y. So, this plus Y comes in terms of fudged statistics that you will see multiple biographs, professional main biographs that are being bandied about on social media. This plus Y comes in form of fudged statistics. Number three... False fudged statistics. Yes. Fudged statistics is at any point in time when there's an individual who becomes a news point. So, I'll give you a quick example like Gurmehar Kaur. She became a news point when, you know, that her slides, you know, she did that video and that came out and it became very controversial. Immediately, a video went viral claiming that it showed a young woman dancing in a SUV kind of a car and drinking and dancing and having fun with her friends. And in large parts of India, a woman doing that would be looked down upon, you know. Because of the conservatism. Because of the social conservatism. Yes. Especially in smaller towns, in rural areas. Exactly. It's only in the metros would people not think twice about it. Exactly. And this person was claimed to be Gurmehar Kaur. I see, I got you. So, number two. Number three, the third kind of misinformation that is often put out is, and this is the most insidious, pernicious kind, which is the communal misinformation. Where random crimes are ascribed to members of the minority community, especially Muslim community. I'll give you a couple of examples real quick. You know, recently on Dasheera, there was a train tragedy in Amritsar where people had gone to see the Ravana. Where they said Navjot Siddhu's wife was present. Yes, yes. That's the same one. So, right after that, you know, and I think 60 or people died, right after that, a message went viral on social media saying that you don't know, but the name of the driver is Imtiaz Ali. So, now the aim was to show that a person who follows of Muslim origin ran over Hindu devotees on a sacred Hindu festival. Okay. The clear purpose to incite passions, to divide people on religious lines. In any case, the person, the name, the name of the person is Arvind Kumar. But in any case, even it had been Imtiaz Ali, the railway doesn't work. It's not a one person thing. You know, there's so many things which work. But in this case, the name of the person was Arvind Kumar. And this happens again and again. But as we had discussed in our earlier conversation, today WhatsApp is not confined to the urban areas or the large metropolitan areas in the small towns. It is spread across rural areas. Women, young people, children are regularly, what? Again, to use Ravish Kumar's famous phrase, getting educated in WhatsApp, Vishwa Vidyalay. Today, we have a country of 135 crore people. According to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, there's 1 crore SIM cards or subscriber identity modules. There are various estimates. Some will say there are roughly 700 million mobile phones of which roughly half are supposed to be smart phones or thereabouts. I mean, we are guests. They're not estimators. The number of WhatsApp users at this point of time are in the range of 250 million. All right. These people have become the leaders of the government. Now, this is going to be the weapon of the Bharati Janta Party, the ruling party to influence public opinion. What kind of ordinary person? What kind of ordinary person who's used one? What should she or he be aware of? How to detect? How to find out what is true and what is false? What is genuine and what is propaganda? See, it is absolutely necessary for netizens to be self-aware in the sense that if you look at misinformation, they also try to prey on your emotional state. So, again, going back to this Pulwama, post Pulwama, the entire country was involved. Even an India-Pakistan match creates so much tension. Now, this is a cross-border thing happening. And that is the time when people are most gullible and are most likely to fall from misinformation. And they are vulnerable to propaganda. They are vulnerable to propaganda. And the messaging of misinformation is also often that generates, that sort of evokes a specific extreme emotion, which is that of hatred, fear, anger. So, people need to be set... And this is difficult. See, I can go into what alt-use does, you do reverse MSS, but the fact is that... Reverse image, photoshopping, technique. But the fact is that the section of population that you are talking about, number one, they have nine to seven jobs, nine to eight jobs. They probably get a couple of hours for doing whatever, WhatsApp, TV, etc. They are not going to open the laptops. First of all, most of them won't have a laptop at home, especially the socioeconomic section that we are talking about. And even if they did, they are not going to go to the laptop and do Facebook, do Google reverse image. Or find out different techniques too. Has this video been manipulated? Has this audio track been cut and pasted, etc. So, people are not going to have that time or the inclination to do that. So, at that point in time, then you need to be self-aware of what's happening around you. If there is any information which is trying to tickle an extreme emotion of yours, you always have to be circumspect. Because that is where... Have to be careful, have to be circumspect. And not immediately forward it to everybody you know. Exactly, because that is what they want. They want to tickle a specific emotion so that you go and press that forward button as an intuitive thing. And that is what you need to be circumspect. Anytime there is this kind of misinformation which is likely to create a social communal discord in the country, then stop yourself and get a more well-rounded perspective. You cannot do reverse image, etc. But at least go and Google a few things. See, you know, don't just read one website. Read multiple things. Look for information from multiple sources. Get a well-rounded perspective. Because the problem is also with mainstream media. We could have... I mean, let's look at it. Even some of the mainstream media organizations, the leading websites, the leading newspapers, the leading television channels, Hindi, English, different languages. Some of them have been made a fool of or they've fallen prey to misinformation, disinformation. Absolutely. And I can even say that there have been sections of the so-called mainstream media which are called the mainstream media. They have been complicit. I'll give you one example. Najib, for example. Even now, you know, I published a front page story that Najib showing a link between Najib and ISIS and then the next day they had, like, in page 7, they had a small thing saying that. Small denial. You're talking about the student of Jawaharlal Nehru University who we still don't know where he is, what he is. He's missing. Now, that clipping is still viral. It doesn't stop being viral. This guy has joined ISIS. Just two days ago, you know, we saw that it is viral again. And this is after about two years. And the same newspaper has taken down the picture of the assets of Amit Shah, the president of the Bharati Janta Party after it was published in a newspaper. And where is that information from? Official information given to the Election Commission of India, information in the public domain. And, you know, in that specific article, let's say they did not specify that he had gotten this from inheritance. All he had to do was update the article. That is the regular journalistic practice that let's say if they have gotten something wrong, then they update the article and give a disclaimer, right? But instead what they chose to do was take down the entire article. But going back to my point, the problem is that, you know, let's say if we were in a different country, I would have said go and look for this information on mainstream media and verify it against mainstream media. But in India, we can't even do that today with even the slightest amount of confidence. So then typically what I tell people is that get a well-rounded perspective that don't depend on just one source of information. You have to look at multiple sources of information and try and find out what multiple sources of information are talking about and get a well-rounded perspective of anything that goes on, especially things that matter, things that, you know, you choose to vote upon. The decision when you choose to give a vote, the decisions, the various things that you use to determine, you know, at least in those things, you need to have a well-rounded perspective. I understand that Altnews has some important initiatives which are going to be unveiled in the coming weeks. Would you like to tell us a little bit about it? So one thing that is going to happen very soon is that, you know, we are coming up with a book and it will be out for pre-order very soon on Amazon. It's called India Missing Form, The True Story. And there, you know, instead of looking at single, single stories, we will give a whole well-rounded perspective of the whole misinformation ecosystem. Besides that, the question of how to find, how to find what is true, what is false, we are also working on an app, a mobile phone app where you can upload images and videos and for stories which have already been fact-checked by us, we'll give you an instant response. So as to make it easy for you on a day-to-day basis, on the go you can figure out, you can share things from WhatsApp and figure out whether you got something on WhatsApp is true or not. So that is also hopefully will be out in a month. Before the elections are. Begin in the middle of April. Okay Pratik, thank you so much for speaking with NewsClick. It's been a pleasure speaking with you. More strength to you and your team of six or eight people who are based in Ahmedabad. You guys are doing excellent work, seminal service I think in countering fake news, disinformation, misinformation. And the message that's coming through from Pratik Sena is straight, sharp, succinct and clear. Be careful. You have to be aware of what you read on WhatsApp, what you share on the social media. There are people who are being paid to emotionally excite you. There are people who are trying to influence you, your political views. Be aware, be careful.